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Comment by sys42590 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that Product Manager is exclusively a trophy job, if at all. It takes quite some skill to manage a product properly, maintain healthy product boundaries, create a sensible roadmap, combat feature creep, etc.

A product manager's skill set can make or break a product.

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I think PMs get a bad rap mostly because it can be less obvious when someone is bad.

If you're a bad programmer and produce nothing, it'll (usually) quickly be discovered (though not always) even if you're good at talking. It's also easy to spot check in the interview before you hire them.

If you're a bad PM, but good at talking - it's easier to pass the interview and it can be harder to know they're bad and fire them.

Great PMs support their teams and make things better for the engineers they work with (especially by avoiding people working on stuff that doesn't matter). Bad ones make their teams miserable and add negative value. The role can also vary depending on the company (sometimes it includes product design work and sometimes it doesn't).

The best PMs I know are also really good at debugging/troubleshooting and have a technical background (I think necessary to be really great).

A bad PM that's good at talking will usually lead to a non-consistent product strategy (due to promising too much to different stakeholders), and subsequently to death march projects to fulfill all the non realistic promises made.

If you're long enough in the tech industry you've seen such people and learned to identify them with good certainty after one or two meetings.

Besides maybe janitor, what skillset in the chain of production doesn't make or break a product?

I like that you say "maybe" about a janitor, because at some point a filthy office will break a product.

Oh, you’d be surprised how much damage a janitor can do (me remembering the time the cleaning guy at my dad’s lab accidentally tipped over a whole shelf of mice)

Wasn't there a story recently about a janitor ruining 20 years of research or something?

It was something about someone getting annoyed over an alarm from a refrigerator and deciding to pull the plug.

It was something about a bunch of scientists who failed to operate a refrigeration system properly.

I agree - as a Product Manager in my third role it is not all that easy and can be in some companies really frustrating. I would say a great data scientist/ head of data science with the freedom to operate would be even more of trophy job in my view.

Those are two completely different skill sets. One focuses on the product and one focuses on the data. Unless, the data IS the product, but that's sort of rare, isn't it?

The author acknowledges this, that a given job is a trophy job for some and not others. PM becomes a trophy job when it exists only to tick a box on your tech climber CV. Many people do it because they are actually interested in building a product. Same with "founder" / owner. VC I'm not sure about.

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